Can Anyone Be Truly ‘Independent’ In Today’s Polarized Politics?

Image

CreditCreditIllustration by Derek Brahney

By Beverly Gage

May 23, 2017

Late in the 19th century, America was besieged by grave problems: rising economic inequality, violent labor struggles, deep conflicts over immigration and race. But the nation’s leaders seemed incapable of addressing any of these things; they frittered away their hours in disputes over tariffs and trade, and when election time came, they lined up in their respective parties, each one hoping for the chance to distribute the federal spoils to itself. Presidential elections were achingly close: In 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost to Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College, fueling a sense that the political process no longer worked properly.

Some Americans demanded electoral reform; we can thank them, with mixed feelings, for inventing the presidential primary. Others turned to “populism,” a Western and Southern revolt against the East Coast elite. Still others embraced the idea that some “independent,” objective authority, standing outside partisan politics, might swoop into Washington and set things right.

Today many Americans are attaching similar hopes to the newly appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, hailed as just the sort of “independent” figure to deliver the truth about Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election. “I believe Mueller will be independent, he will be thorough and he will be fair,” said Representative Elijah Cummings, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan professed a similar need “to ensure thorough and independent investigations are allowed to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

Given the parade of scandals and lies emanating from the Trump White House, the prospect of finding one independent soul among our thousands of partisan warriors holds an obvious political appeal. But what does it mean to be truly “independent” in the hyperpartisan 21st century, when nearly everything in American life seems to end up as a mark on the political scorecard — pro or con, win or loss, Republican or Democrat? Is it still possible to survive as an independent operator within the atmosphere of personal vendetta and political retribution that is Trump’s Washington? Or will the Russia investigation turn out to be a showdown not only between the president and his critics but also between partisanship and the very idea of political independence?

The firing of the former F.B.I. director James Comey highlights some of the dangers here. Once widely celebrated as an “independent straight shooter,” in the words of The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin, Comey left office under a cloud of partisan recrimination and suspicion, attacked first by Democrats and then by Republicans. This hints at a larger crisis in Washington, one that stretches far beyond anything we may ever learn about Trump or Russia. Perhaps no government employee can ever be entirely free of bias, but agencies like the F.B.I. are at least supposed to aim for that ideal, in part to provide everyone else with a dependable record of facts. If we move too far from a system in which nonpartisan civil servants can act with some level of autonomy, it will be a disaster not just for law enforcement but for the swaths of our government where millions of men and women work to offer accurate budget estimates and labor statistics, reliable census data and nuanced foreign-policy advice. At its best, the nonpartisan imperative doesn’t just exist to save us from figures like Trump; it exists to save us from our own biases and limitations. And despite the many feel-good affirmations of Mueller’s “independence” in the coming Russia investigation, this ideal has rarely been more difficult to fulfill.

In colonial America, “independence” meant something relatively simple: freedom from economic dependence, or the ownership of land and wealth. By the 18th century, though, the word had acquired a more explicit political meaning: Men needed to be “independent” in order to think clearly about the common good and thus to rule themselves. For the founders, this came with many limitations of race, gender and class. As a political vision, though, it communicated a higher purpose: Officeholders would have to reject the temptations of partisanship and personal interest lest, as George Washington warned in his farewell speech, “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” use the white-hot animosities of party politics to “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

This ideal of the selfless federal servant was always partly a noble fiction; as “Hamilton” fans know, the founding era’s hostilities were vicious enough that a vice president killed a former Treasury secretary. The aspiration to meet that ideal nonetheless held sway well into the 1820s, creating what became known as the “Era of Good Feelings.” It was as debates over slavery and territorial expansion heated up that party warfare returned. The Civil War itself erupted in the aftermath of a partisan event: the election of the country’s first Republican president.

Two decades later, the assassination of President James Garfield brought a new round of national soul-searching. The deranged assassin, Charles Guiteau, said he committed the deed in order to unify the Republican Party and because he felt he had deserved a patronage appointment as a European ambassador. A couple years later, in 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, the nation’s first comprehensive Civil Service law, designed partly to calm the roiling political waters. Under these new rules, many federal jobs would be parceled out according to “merit” rather than party patronage, ensuring the independence and integrity of at least some of the people serving in government.

As the 20th century dawned, and Americans embraced the promise of apolitical government expertise, administrative agencies and bureaus proliferated — among them the tiny Bureau of Investigation. Founded in 1908, the bureau started out plagued by the very problems Civil Service law was designed to eliminate: incompetence, corruption and crony appointments. Then, in 1924, a bustling young director named J. Edgar Hoover set about whipping the bureau into shape. Hoover is often seen today as a tyrant and a violator of civil liberties, but when he came to office, he was considered a reformer and an enemy of “politics,” a man who could be relied upon to tell the truth when everyone else seemed to be lying for partisan ends.

He was no political naïf, however. Despite his fealty to the idea of nonpartisan professionalism, Hoover fought to keep his agents out of the Civil Service, sure that its rules and regulations would limit his autonomy as director. This sleight of hand gave Hoover’s F.B.I. its peculiar character, at once a respected investigative body and a personal fief. It also helped to insulate Hoover from the fate visited upon James Comey. As the Times journalist Tom Wicker noted two years before Hoover’s death in 1972, the F.B.I. director achieved “virtually unlimited power and independence.” No president, Republican or Democrat, ever dared to fire him.

This is one example of how bureaucratic independence can go awry. In the mid-1970s, alarmed by abuses of power during Hoover’s nearly 48-year directorship, Congress decided that future F.B.I. directors should be subject to a 10-year limit. The policy effectively split the difference between autonomy and accountability: The president still had the right to fire an F.B.I. director, but the law established a standard period of service longer than any president’s two terms. One of several things Trump’s showdown with Comey calls into question is whether this arrangement is still enough to ensure a reasonable level of F.B.I. independence — especially under a president disinclined to observe political norms.

Today many Americans approach the notion of professional, nonpartisan expertise with suspicion, seeing it as mere cover for elite interests, bureaucratic self-preservation or partisan agendas. This is partly for good reason: The track record of our “independent” experts has been mixed in recent years. The intelligence community miscalculated grievously about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many economic authorities failed to see the financial crisis coming. Even “independent counsels” have hardly been blameless; witness the lingering bitterness over Kenneth Starr’s investigations of Bill Clinton. In this context, any politically sensitive investigation, whether of Hillary Clinton’s emails or Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, runs the risk of appearing to be no more than another way to score points against the enemy.

Trump seems to believe this is what’s happening to him and has lashed out at any agency or hearing that delivers bad news. His showdown with the professional Civil Service isn’t limited to the intelligence community either. At the State Department, career employees are faced with proposed budget cuts and White House indifference; at the departments of Energy and Education, the people in charge seem to have been placed there primarily to undo what their departments do best. Trump’s decision to fire Comey may have set a particularly dangerous precedent, but it is really only one part of a greater crisis of authority, that no independent prosecutor or commission can entirely fix. The enthusiasm for Mueller’s appointment suggests that “independence” still holds some power as a political ideal. The hard part has always been putting it into practice.

Beverly Gage is a professor of American political history at Yale. She is the author of “The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror” and is currently writing a biography of the former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.